Upgrading the children

A pioneering scheme to computerise a whole people

TINY, landlocked Rwanda is sometimes touted as Africa's high-tech economy. It is still a bit early for that, however. Neighbouring Uganda produces far more computer-science graduates. Countries such as Nigeria and Kenya are even further ahead. South Africa is out of sight. But technology is the core of Rwanda's plan to transform its economy by 2020. The country seems ready to back its ambition with money and policies.

By 2012, for instance, Rwanda wants every child in the country between the ages of nine and 12, 1.3m children in all, to have a laptop, each with an internet or intranet connection to download free educational software and electronic books. “We estimate the start-up cost will be $313m,” says Richard Niyonkuru of Rwanda's education ministry. If all goes well, the programme will embrace children between six and eight by 2015.

The supplier will be One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), an American charity linked to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which has been trying for years to push cheap and robust laptops into primary schools in poor countries. Yet critics say the present version of the OLPC machine is too expensive, too clunky and too slow. The charity has failed to sell as many laptops as it had hoped. Its deals with some governments have stalled.

For its part, OLPC says it has ironed out its laptop's flaws and that Rwanda will meet its 2012 target. The charity's head, Nicholas Negroponte, reckons the impact of the computer, which was originally to be subsidised and sold for $100, is not just about numbers sold. OLPC, he says, can take some credit for promoting cheaper laptops called netbooks and cheaper screens. Rwanda has ordered an initial 100,000 laptops at a cost of $181 each.

By 2012 the Rwandans want to be supplied with more advanced laptops that OlpC is developing. These will be made from a single piece of plastic. They will be waterproof, harder to break, have colour screens, yet could cost as little as $75 each. With prices that low, say the Rwandans, children might be able to keep one laptop through their entire school career. Schoolwork, textbooks and a library of other books and applications would be stored in them, with screens designed to be readable in bright sunshine and to use minimal power in huts without electricity at night.

Rwanda's austere president, Paul Kagame, believes the initial outlay will be worth it. How else, he says, to produce the 50,000 computer programmers the country wants by 2020? OLPC says its research in Rwanda and elsewhere suggests that children work harder and think more creatively with a laptop. They appear to escape the drudgery of rote learning, the curse of many African primary schools, though some educationalists think laptops stunt interaction between children in class.

If the scheme is to be profitable, software will eventually have to be written to link computers to omnipresent mobile phones. Money must also be found to keep updating the laptops. On the plus side, the project's proposed scale means that small businesses will spring up to charge, repair and enhance the machines. Rwanda thinks it can also use laptops to improve government services. The laptops could then move the country seamlessly into electronic government. That, at any rate, is the hope.